Now, the question that comes to mind is, how do we find the sum of an arithmetic sequence?

Recall the method that we used in “Finding the sum of the first n positive integers.” We added the integers twice with the order of the terms reversed as shown above. Clearly, we can use this method to find the sum of the arithmetic sequence 3, 7, 11, 15, 19, 23, 27.

The sum of each term is always 30, and there are 7 terms, so which implies that

.

The sequence above has 7 terms and 30 is the sum of the first and the last term. In a generalized arithmetic sequence, 7 is or the number of terms and is the sum of the first term and the nth term . Substituting the general arithmetic sequence to the calculation above, we have

which is also equal to

.

This result is also the same if we add the generalized arithmetic sequence. The terms of the generalized arithmetic sequence with first term and difference are , , , and so on with nth term . If we add the terms as we have done above, we have the following sum.